MIT put its full multivariable calculus course online in 2007 and charged nobody a dollar for it. Lecture 34 is the final review. A professor in an orange sweater writes Unit 1 on a chalkboard and starts working through the whole semester. The camera never moves much. No editing,... no music, no production budget visible anywhere. MIT OpenCourseWare launched in 2001 with 50 courses. The plan was to publish materials from every course the university taught. Faculty were told they would get no royalties and no extra pay. Most agreed anyway. The catalog passed 2,400 courses. Downloads run past 300,000,000 and the site draws millions of visitors a year from countries with no equivalent institution. Universities charging 60,000 dollars a year watched a peer give the lectures away and kept charging. The thing people pay for was never the lecture.show more

Respect to the people that understand this level of mathematics.

The most valuable thing about this is that MIT simply put the knowledge out there and asked for nothing in return. Meanwhile other universities watched this happen and kept raising their prices.

I'm in school for civil engineering right now and every class is on YouTube from many different universities. I've even found classes which won't be in my track like bridge design that I can take for free after graduation. The price is the certification not the knowledge.

Higher education was never valuable because there was some sort of secret knowledge hidden from the public. It’s a skill transfer process for jobs that require verification that you were taught by a professional and actually learned the skill. Videos teach but don’t verify.

Real scholars--the ones who should be professors--do their work for nothing. They are motivated by interest and creativity. And as for the administration. All this work would be done by graduate students. All the counselors and staff get generous salaries, even though they have no interest in the subject being taught. They could be replaced by graduate students who really care and would be saved a lifetime of debt. The Catholic church works this way. It is natural and cost effective.

Mark, seems like this would be simple enough for you to write without AI.

Uhh yea no shit. You can walk into any university lecture at any time and learn for free. You’re paying for the credentials after graduation

The UK was providing this service decades before through Open University lecture courses that were broadcast daily on free-to-air TV.

MIT free courses more useful that half of unis

videos like that are nice to watch but they are not a substitute for the real deal

Multivariable calculus was the fun one actually. Differential equations I did not enjoy 🙃

did this guy spend 40 years trying to delete this video from internet?

@donallen02 MIT offers free college-level courses ( Khan Academy offers courses for kids from Pre-K forward.

แคลคูลัส คือวิชาที่สนุกมาก ยิ่งทำได้ยิ่งรู้สึกว่าความฉลาดขยับมากขึ้น

Free lectures but people still pay for the degree, that line hits hard 💯

I passed up to multivariate—but never really understood it. Now I’m an electrician. 🤨

We need more of this and fewer cat videos.

man. for a moment i thought you were sharing a prompt for Flux 3. my TL is flooded with that sh

I was truly all in.....then about 10 words in my mouth opened and I noticed a slight drip out the corner of my mouth. I dont think variable multiverse calculusasus if for me Dormomu

Use to watch it on my YouTube feed. Had absolutely no idea what was going on but it sounded good

that's so powerful and beautiful

I'm pretty sure arithmetic is maths

Not to nitpick, but the camera is clearly moving in that clip. But yes, the MIT open courseware is great!

The thing people pay $60k a year for was never the lecture itself. How many still confuse access to information with the ability to actually use it?

This MIT lecture from 2007 still hits harder than most paid classes today

I watched their intro to Real Analysis undergrad class on youtube last year and the prof just walks into the 1st class & starts writing proofs on the chalkboard which was 4 chalkboards wide, 3 chalkboards high, and he just cycled through them as he went without stopping for ????

MIT OpenCourseWare has been a major part of my life, in fact I have learned far more from it's curriculum than I ever did in graduate school and for free!

next time ask the AI to make your text look less AI

Interesting

MIT course for free mean nothing. It's the piece of fancy paper w/ your name written in gold leaf that means everything. -especially today. How else are you going to stand out from the other applications at Starbucks?

Obama made this illegal. Said something like dead people wouldn’t have access. So they stopped doing it.

I thought we just all knew this stuff naturally? You guys needed a class for this?

Because companies dont care about knowledge they care about credentials.

The fact that this exists and it not passed around in colleges is a testament to the fact that it's lectureslop and doesn't actually help people who don't learn from lecture slop. Learning from these genuinely sucks like you have no idea.

The lecture was only one layer of education. Access changes the game, but mentorship, community, and accountability remain hard to replicate.